JFrog Artifactory Certified DevOps Engineer: Build Integration, CI/CD and Metadata

Build Integration, CI/CD and Metadata

This domain tests capturing build provenance, publishing build info, and using metadata to drive promotion and traceability.

Core rules

• Build integration collects build info: build name and number, modules, artifacts and dependencies with checksums, environment variables, VCS details, and timestamps.
• JFrog CLI is the portable integration: jf rt upload, jf rt download, jf rt build-collect-env, jf rt build-publish, and jf rt build-promote. Native Maven, Gradle, and npm integrations also produce build info when configured with the Artifactory endpoint.
• Build info is published to Artifactory as a build run under a build name and number. It links artifacts to the build and enables Xray scanning, promotion, and build comparison.
• Promotion copies or moves artifacts from one repository to another and can attach properties and dependencies. Promotion is a metadata operation plus repository copy or move, not a rebuild.
• Properties are key-value metadata on artifacts, folders, and builds. AQL and property searches let automation select artifacts by metadata rather than path alone.

Worked example

A CI job runs jf rt build-collect-env myapp 42, uploads the jar with jf rt upload target/app-1.0.jar libs-staging-local/com/acme/app/1.0/, and publishes with jf rt build-publish myapp 42. The build run now records the jar checksum and environment. After tests pass, jf rt build-promote myapp 42 libs-release-local --copy=true copies the build's artifacts to the release repo. Downstream automation can query the build or use properties such as stage=release to find the promoted jar. If the build info was never published, promotion cannot locate the artifacts as a build.

Traps

Publishing build info before uploads finish, so modules are incomplete. Reusing a build number for different content and losing traceability. Promoting by copying files manually and expecting build links to follow. Treating properties as mutable deployment state without documenting them. Forgetting that build-collect-env must run in the same CLI context as the build.